How filmmakers Al and Al tackled the story of Alan Turing for 'The Creator'

Film makers Al and Al
decided to tackle the story of Alan Turing when they realised that
they were in love with their computers.

"We were having a relationship with our machines, they all had
names. It was around this moment that we remembered the
relationship we had with computers when we were growing up,
programming our Commodore 64's and playing on our Atari consoles," the filmmakers explain to Wired.co.uk via
email.

"Everyone knows their own computer -- what it will do, what it
will struggle with, what procedures you have to go through to get
it to do what you want," they continue, "and everyone knows that
dreadful moment when it crashes or it will no longer boot up and
you start worrying about everything you have lost and start
shouting and talking to it as if it can hear you. Once we knew who
was the seed of the machines we were in love with, that's when we
saw computers in a new light."

Al and Al: His story is really better than any Hollywood movie,
and, because of homophobia, it was forbidden to be made for the longest
time. We have really been drawn to his story for a long time and
were waiting for the perfect moment to do something. So when
Cornerhouse and Abandon Normal Devices Festival commissioned
The Creator and told us the premiere would be on Turing's
100th birthday, we knew that moment had arrived.

Who is the modern day Alan Turing?

Alan Turing's work spans an extraordinary range of achievements,
so the answer depends on what field you compare him to. For
example, the recent mysterious death of MI6 code breaker Gareth Williams makes him a modern day Turing.

As Turing is the man who gave birth to the ideas, which led to
the computer age and is the first man to have written a computer
instruction manual, you could say Steve Jobs. It's curious to think of the international reaction
to Jobs'
death and the relative obscurity of Turing, but they share
their life's work developing the idea to make universal machines
capable of doing multiple tasks, and the ambition to make those
machines faster than anything in existence. Then there's David Ferrucci, who is leading the research team of Watson, an
artificial intelligence computer system capable of passing the
Turing test.

And, of course, there is the Turing prize, which is the highest
distinction in computer science. This year's winner was Judea Pearl who is best known for championing the probabilistic
approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian
networks.

When Turing died, his work on Morphogenesis was perhaps a move towards the nervous
system, so this linked together with the exploration of his
unconscious mind and the dream diary he was keeping during Jungian
therapy, may have resulted in something like Antonio Damasio's research.

But as we know when Turing was working, there were no such
specialised fields of study -- he was inventing them, so you could
say we may not know who the modern Turing is as he is probably
being completely ignored.